Foreign Aid 2

Final Project Essentials: Fixed Effects

Jeremy Springman

University of Pennsylvania

Global Development: Intermediate Topics in Politics, Policy, and Data

PSCI 3200 - Spring 2024

Logistics

Assignments

Agenda


  1. Cruz (2016)
  2. Bold et al. (2018)
  3. Review of Data Assignment 1

Overview of Foreign Aid

Introduction

Topics

  1. Service delivery and the state
  2. A brief history of non-state service delivery
  3. Contemporary non-state service delivery

Learning Objectives

  • What types of non-state actors are involved in service delivery in Africa?
  • What are the main causes of the emergence and growth of these organizations, and what are their likely consequences for citizen welfare and state capacity?
  • What are the limiting factors that are likely to prevent these actors from supplanting state service provision?

Service Delivery & The State

What do states do? (Hoffman, 2015)

  • Monopolize violence
  • Levy taxes
  • Obtain the assent of the population

Why is public service delivery (PSD) important?

  • Promotes economic growth
  • Improves welfare of citizens

The Social Contract

Mutual reliance between states and citizens

  • States need tax revenue
  • Citizens need public services
    • Provision of clean water accounts for 60% of the increase in life expectancy in the United States between 1850 and 1950 (Troesken 2001).

Virtuous cycle between taxation, PSD, and state capacity

  • Taxation \(\Rightarrow\) citizen demand for PSD
  • Government PSD \(\Rightarrow\) citizen compliance with taxation
  • Citizen compliance with taxation \(\Rightarrow\) increased state capacity
  • Citizen reliance on PSD \(\Rightarrow\) political accountability (Hoffman and Gibson 2005)

The Fiscal Exchange (Bodea and LeBas 2014)

How does this work in social contexts without direct taxation?

Exchange-driven social contract emergence

  • Compliance obtains when people expect that services will be delivered
  • Compliance is conditional

Norm-driven social contract emergence

  • Tax morale and civic duty
  • Compliance is internalized

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

Service delivery in the pre-colonial period

  • Pre-colonial African states did not engage in extensive service delivery (Herbst 2000)
    • States weren’t geographically bounded
  • Christian missions were (kinda) the first service providers
    • Emphasis on literacy and formalizing indigenous languages
    • Competing with traditional healers (Chirwa 2016)

Colonial approaches to service delivery

  • Traditional medicine was outlawed (Chirwa 2016)
  • The church is “cemented” as the primary service provider (Jennings 2014)
    • Tanzania at the end of the colonial period
    • Church operated 81% of primary health facilities
    • Church-operated schools outnumbered government schools 4-to-1

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

Post-colonial period

  • Post-colonial African states nationalized service delivery infrastructure and increased spending dramatically
  • Spending was unsustainable (Bates 1981; J. Brass 2014)
    • Kenya’s Civil Services (Young 1988)
    • 1945: 14,000
    • 1955: 45,000
    • 1978: 170,000
  • Commodity boom \(\Rightarrow\) commodity bust
  • Structural adjustment
    • Kenya’s Health Spending (J. Brass 2014)
    • 1980: $9.8 million
    • 1993: $6.2 million
    • 1996: $3.6 million

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

In 2007, 9% and 16% of US economic engagement with developing countries has been Official Development Assistance and private philanthropy respectively (Kapur and Whittle 2009).

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

Faith Based Organizations (FBOs) (Green et al. 2002)

  • Church “umbrella” organizations (ex. Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau)
  • International religious FBOs (ex. World Vision)
    • Operate more like secular NGOs
  • What do FBOs have in common? (Jennings 2014)

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

Malawi: Number of health facilities

Year Gov FBO NGO
2005 426 160 32
2008 545 167 70
2013 478 167 57

Kenya: Number of health facilities

Year Gov FBO NGO
2007 2,445 1,060 83
2012 4,043 998 218
2014 4,637 1,071 346

Regions

Non-governmental Organizations

What are NGOs?

  • Private, non-profit organizations that aim to improve societal well-being through service delivery
  • Provide free services, strengthen existing social infrastructure
  • International, local
  • Receive most of their funding from foreign aid contracts (Fafchamps and Owens 2009; J. N. Brass 2012)
  • Generally seen as apolitical (Grebe 2016)
  • Marie Stopes Uganda: Provided 75% of the Intrauterine Devices distributed in Uganda between 2006 and 2011
  • Maximize on impact (Dang, Owens, et al. 2017)

Non-governmental Organizations

Who do NGOs serve?

  • Target needy communities
  • Target convenient communities
  • “Pragmatic saints” (J. N. Brass 2012)

Regions

## Citizen Attitudes on NGOs

  • Kenya: 70% of respondents said that NGOs “have the interests of the people in mind” but 34% said the same for government (J. Brass 2016).
  • Tanzanian: 81% report that NGOs have “benefited” their community (Jivani 2010).
  • Malawi: 60% agree that “Development NGOs provide services than cannot be provided by any other agency”; 68% consider NGOs to be effective (Jamali 2014).
  • Liberia: 23% of respondents trust government but 72% trust NGOs; 72% describe government as corrupt, but 19% describe NGOs as corrupt (Tsai, 2017).

NGOs & Politics

How might NGO service delivery impact politics?

NGO service delivery may weaken the ‘Fiscal Link’

  • Reduce reliance of government on taxation
  • Reduce reliance on citizens on PSD
  • Weaken the link between government performance and citizen welfare

NGO service delivery may undermine accountability

  • Politicians get credit for NGO PSD (increase satisfaction)
  • NGOs make people more apolitical about government PSD (decrease incentives to monitor)

NGOs & Politics

NGOs as complements to the state (J. Brass 2014)

  • Joint implementation / co-production
    • Learning
    • Resource sharing
  • Participation in government decision making
    • Lobbying for policy-changes
    • Transmitting information on citizen preferences
  • Integration of NGOs into government plans
    • Budgeting

NGOs & Politics

NGOs as complements to the state (J. Brass 2014)

  • NGOs don’t let governments “off the hook”
  • Co-production builds state capacity
  • NGOs encourage a spirit of democratic accountability

Necessary conditions

  • Open political climate
  • Autonomous agencies
  • Motivated civil servants

The Limitations of NGOs

Share of Aid Projects by Implementor and Sector (2000 - 2014)
Sector Govt NGO Count
Health 13% 87% 479
Education 42% 58% 242
Agriculture/Extension 32% 68% 182
Social Infrastructure 32% 68% 291
Transportation Infrastructure 100% 0% 96
Energy 100% 0% 49
Water and Sanitation 70% 30% 259
Business/Trade Development 87% 13% 15
Total 45% 55% 1900

The Limitations of NGOs

Experimental Evidence on Scaling Up Education Reforms in Kenya (bold2013?)

  • What is the reform?
    • Hiring contract teachers
    • Government vs NGO implementation
  • Outcome?
    • Student test scores
  • Why should it work?
    1. Smaller class sizes
    2. SMC can fire low-quality teachers
    3. Contract teachers don’t have tenure

The Limitations of NGOs

Experimental Evidence on Scaling Up Education Reforms in Kenya

  • What are the findings?
    • NGO implementation increased test scores
    • Government implementation had no effect
  • Why?
    • Teacher effort: No
    • Government monitoring: No
    • Bureaucratic delays in payment: Yes (⅓ of effect)
    • Political economy factors: Yes (union identification)

What does this tell us about the limitations of NGOs?

Review of Data Assignment 1

Additive Scale

What is an additive scale?

  • Simple sum across columns (index = column_1 + column_2)

Takeaways

  • When variables are measured on a common scale
  • When you are interested in a cumulative amount of something
  • Not good for likert scales
  • How to deal with NAs

References

Bates, Robert H. 1981. Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies. Univ of California Press.
Bodea, Cristina, and Adrienne LeBas. 2014. The Origins of Voluntary Compliance: Attitudes toward Taxation in Urban Nigeria.” British Journal of Political Science, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341400026X.
Brass, Jennifer. 2014. “Blurring the Boundaries: NGOs, the State, and Service Provision in Kenya.” The Politics of Non-State Welfare.
———. 2016. Allies or Adversaries: NGOs and the State in Africa. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316678527.
Brass, Jennifer N. 2012. “Why Do NGOs Go Where They Go? Evidence from Kenya.” World Development 40 (2): 387–401.
Chirwa, Danwood M. 2016. “Access to Medicines and Health Care in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Historical Perspective.” Md. J. Int’l L. 31: 21.
Dang, Canh Thien, Trudy Owens, et al. 2017. “What Motivates Ugandan NGOs to Diversify: Risk Reduction or Private Gain?”
Fafchamps, Marcel, and Trudy Owens. 2009. The Determinants of Funding to Ugandan Nongovernmental Organizations.” The World Bank Economic Review.
Grebe, Eduard. 2016. “The Ambiguities of the ‘Partnership’between Civil Society and the State in Uganda’s AIDS Response During the 1990s and 2000s as Demonstrated in the Development of TASO.” Global Public Health 11 (4): 496–512.
Green, A, J Shaw, F Dimmock, and Cath Conn. 2002. A Shared Mission? Changing Relationships Between Government and Church Health Services in Africa.” The International Journal of Health Planning and Management 17 (4): 333–53.
Herbst, Jeffrey. 2000. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton University Press.
Hoffman, Barak D, and Clark C Gibson. 2005. Fiscal Governance and Public Services: Evidence from Tanzania and Zambia.” San Diego: Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego.
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Jennings, Michael. 2014. Bridging the Local and the Global: Faith-Based Organisations and the Emergence of the Non-State Provider Sector in Tanzania.” The Politics of Non-State Welfare.
Jivani, Razeen. 2010. What are the Impacts of Non-Governmental Organizations on the Lives of the Citizens of Tanzania?
Kapur, Devesh, and Dennis Whittle. 2009. Can the Privatization of Foreign Aid Enhance Accountability.” NYU Journal of International Law & Politics 42: 1143.
Munthali, AC, H Mannan, M MacLachlan, L Swartz, CM Makupe, and C Chilimampunga. 2015. Non-use of Formal Health Services in Malawi: Perceptions from Non-users.” Malawi Medical Journal 26 (4): 126–32.
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Tumwesigye, Tonny. 2013. Health Service Delivery by the PNFP Subsector in Uganda.” Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau.
Young, Crawford. 1988. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. Yale University Press.